The United Nations Security Council recently passed a resolution aimed at disrupting the channels through which the Islamic State of Iraq & the Levant (ISIL) finances its terror campaigns. Led by the United States and Russia, the resolution calls on all states to review their economic sanctions against terrorist groups and those that finance terrorism, in the hopes of achieving better international integration and cooperation.
This is not just another year-end UN resolution; it’s a topic that matters greatly to the U.S., and it should to Canada, as well. Combating terrorist financing has been a central pillar of America’s anti-ISIL strategy since day one, as ISIL will continue to exist, so long as it can feed, arm and pay its recruits more to fight than rival Syrian rebel groups can.
Yet Canada cannot claim to have taken the threat of ISIL funding seriously in the way the U.S. has. Canada’s sanctions, legislation and enforcement are outdated, under-funded and limited in scope. Canada, for example, has sanctions on Syria, but the focus remains on the Assad regime rather than ISIL. In any event, there is no way to sanction human rights abusers for their crimes under the current legislation. The scope of the legislation is also geographically limited to transactions into and out of Syria, meaning that once goods move into Turkey or Iraq, as virtually all of them do, it becomes very hard for this country act.
Canada does have a series of complementary “terrorist regulations,” but how these regulatory regimes work together is convoluted and leaves gaping holes. Moreover, in many cases, these regulations are merely derivatives of UN lists of sanctioned terrorists, which creates its own set of problems, most prominently around the fairness of using possibly unsubstantiated foreign information as the basis for punitive Canadian laws.
The sum of current Canadian practice can probably be most closely compared to what existed in the U.K. up until several years ago, when the British Foreign Office went through a complete overhaul of its sanctions-related practices. If the Brits needed to review their laws and practices then, so does Canada now.
As a starting point, Canada could take note of the new sanctions coordination unit within the British Foreign Office, which is similar to the one that exists in both the U.S. State and Treasury Departments. Canada has no meaningful equivalent, meaning that while our home base for sanctions and international terrorist financing regulation is the Foreign Affairs department, there is little centralized coordination between government agencies, or even within the department itself.
More to the point, giving Foreign Affairs sole discretion over sanctions is ill-conceived: the department has no ability to conduct covert research, unlike CSIS and CSEC, and no investigative and enforcement capacity, unlike the RCMP or Border Services. If the Liberal government wants to show it is serious about hitting ISIL where it hurts, it should start by diffusing responsibility for international sanctions beyond Foreign Affairs by creating an inter-departmental team of specialists that is tasked with creating a more integrated system, while updating and amalgamating the existing legislation.
The other big issue — both now and if an integrated team were to be formed — is oversight. While Bill C-51 was criticized for providing insufficient oversight of CSIS operations, at least there was some oversight in place. When it comes to how Foreign Affairs investigates and constructs its sanctions lists and terrorist regulations, there is currently no oversight body — parliamentary or otherwise. The same would be true of an inter-department task force: there is nobody who overseas integrated operations from a whole-of-government perspective. Oversight in this case is not just about protecting rights, it’s also about ensuring that our government departments work together to get our security right.
Fortunately, much of this work can be done for a fraction of what it costs to have CF-18s overseas; a relatively small budget and the right strategic direction would go a long way. It would also present an opportunity to collaborate with, and learn from, our allies, including the U.S. and U.K. Let us hope that the Liberal government seizes this opportunity in the new year and integrates a review of Canada’s sanctions and terrorist financing regimes into its promised review of Bill C-51.
National Post
